The uPart experience: building a wireless sensor network

This paper presents an experience report illustrating the design of the uPart tiny low-power sensor network platform: from the analysis phase over the definition of the application, design and construction of hardware, the implementation of the software and network to the application set-up. uPart sensor nodes were given away in the conference badge to 500 voluntary attendees of the Ubicomp 2005. In our demo application, uParts were able to recognize activities of attendees of the Ubicomp 2005 conference. Design was carried out under serve time and budget restrictions. The paper focuses on reporting design decisions and presents technical details of uPart hardware, firmware and applications. It also shows first qualitative experiences with the run of the system at the conference. The outcome of the paper is a general meta-guideline for designing sensor network systems under similar conditions